Monday, May 16 2016
4:45 am wake-up. So much for a delightful
honeymoon! Car picks us up at 5:45 and we are off to LAX. We make it to the
airport in no time, but once we get off the freeway at LAX traffic is a
standstill. Monday morning business commuters are clogging departures. We
arrive at Delta 46 minutes before our flight and go to the skycap. He informs
us checked baggage closes 45 minutes before the flight. I look at my watch:
it’s 44 minutes to go. He rushes inside with our IDs and comes back smiling
with luggage tags. They’ll take the bags. But
will they get on our flight? we wonder.
We rush to security. Fortunately we have
Precheck, so we zip up to TSA security check, make it through in no time and
power walk to our gate. The plane is boarded. No one is there, but it’s 21
minutes before flight, which means there is a minute left before the gate is
closed. We board, find our seats in Economy Comfort, and settle in, hoping our
bags make it.
Off the plane in JFK, we head to baggage
claim (easily a mile walk from our gate) and Laura sees my distinctive grey and
orange bag instantly. We pull it from the carousel, quickly grabbing our other
two bags. Soon we are Ubering (now a verb) to Manhattan. As we are driving, I get
a call. It’s Delta Baggage Handling. Evidently we grabbed someone else’s grey
and orange bag and the woman is waiting for her bag, which we have in the car
with us. The Uber driver turns around and we head back to JFK. I run into baggage claim with the grey and
orange carryon in tow. Bags exchanged at the Delta Baggage Handling desk, I ask
where the woman is who is waiting for her bag. I’m shown who the person is and
I apologize profusely. She admits she’s never seen another of her distinctive
grey and orange bags and she took mine off the carousel before discovering she
had the wrong bag. We exchange apologies and I’m back to the car.
After checking into our hipster hotel on the
Upper West Side near Central Park, we quickly assess we are starved. It’s not
quite 6 pm EDT but Laura hasn’t eaten since she made bacon and egg cups at home
at 5:30 am PDT and I hadn’t eaten since I had dissected my cold, sad breakfast
wrap after reaching altitude. We walked around the corner from the hotel to a
restaurant I’d been to before, a fantastic Asian-inspired place called Redfarm.
We had crispy skin chicken, lobster with chopped pork, and some amazing
cocktails made even more amazing because they had simple syrup. We’ve been on a
low-carb diet for six weeks and have had virtually no sugar. The sweet taste of
the cocktails makes us giddier than the gin and tequila in our drinks.
After, we take a walk down Broadway. The
night is cool but pleasant and after walking a dozen blocks or so we hail an
Uber and drive to the Lower East Side to make a pilgrimage to Dead Rabbit,
awarded Best Bar in the World every year since it opened five or six years
Laura begins to fade fast, so we cab it back
to our hotel and crash, even though it was only 8:15 pm in Los Angeles.
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